It was a bottle of vinegar in his mother's kitchen which started Robert "Bob" Smithies' lifelong skill with words, a gift which he combined unusually with an eye for a great picture and an instinct for what makes gripping television. The three talents brought him success as a newspaper photographer, television presenter and editor, and finally and most famously as Bunthorne, the artful compiler of Guardian crosswords.

The Gartons vinegar label was the first clue to the future awaiting Bob, who has died at his home in Arnside aged 72. Waiting for his fish and chips, he realised happily what the letters spelt backwards. Such wordplay was central to his modest childhood home in Middleton, Lancashire, where his father was a jack-of-all-trades and his mother worked shifts in a mill canteen. Both wanted their children to have the chances denied to their generation and found imaginative ways of encouraging this. Often away working on wartime airfields, Smithies senior spent his leave challenging Bob and his two younger sisters to pick any word they liked from a dictionary or encyclopaedia for him to define, which he always could. He taught himself French and insisted on speaking it at home when Bob started the subject at Queen Elizabeth's grammar in Middleton.

There were not the resources to keep the boy on at the school beyond 16, but Bob was eager to get into journalism anyway. He chased a job at the Manchester Evening News darkroom, where he ran errands and filed negatives with numb fingers in an icy warehouse. He loved the images and his enthusiasm was noticed by colleagues such as the Manchester Guardian's distinguished photographer Walter Doughty. The teenager was given a go with a camera and his photographs soon appeared in the Evening News.

The Guardian's then editor AP Wadsworth (who uniquely, for holders of the post, had also left school at 16) wanted him on board, but warned Bob that the Evening News would never let such a star go. That was an irresistible challenge, and when Doughty retired in 1955 after 40 years, Smithies got the job. He became a central part of the Guardian's years under Wadsworth's successors Alastair Hetherington and Peter Preston, travelling the world but maintaining an illustrious tradition of wonderful images from the north of England. These involved unusual challenges for a comfortable bon viveur, fond of food and good wine, who could never see the point of Hetherington's wholesome delight in walking, climbing and the great outdoors.

Smithies enjoyed recounting the background to one of his pictures which had the editor in raptures a doughty walker defying blizzards on the Pennine Way at Christmas. "I just drove up the Snake (pass between Sheffield and Manchester), parked up where the footpath crosses and turned the car heater on," he would recall. "Then I waited for the first silly sod to materialise out of the snow." In practice he had the best newspaper photographers' ability to wait for ages and then act immediately when an image appeared; it was another such picture, of Louis Armstrong in action at Belle Vue in Manchester, which he always credited with getting him on to the Guardian.

Sharing digs with the cartoonist Papas, he travelled the country and the world, sneaking into Balmoral castle with Michael Frayn, drinking with Brendan Behan and photographing President Eisenhower. But he retained a modesty which allowed him to hold on to another invaluable asset for a news photographer; the ability to pass unnoticed, quietly taking the picture which would make the next day's front page.

The gradual shift of the Guardian's centre of gravity to London saddened him as the northern band of brothers and sisters dwindled, but he took pleasure in the work of his eventual successors, Denis Thorpe and Don McPhee. When he left the paper in 1974, head-hunted by Granada Television, it was not through disillusion but zest for a new challenge. Bob went in as a television news editor, but David Plowright heard his rich, deep voice and arranged a screen test. Smithies was soon in front of the cameras, presenting a wide range of programmes and becoming a well-known face in the north-west. One of his most-appreciated series, Down to Earth, saw him investigating the countryside and its ways, for all the world like a stockier and slightly less agile Alastair Hetherington. He retired 12 years ago but remained a regular contributor, making his last appearance on screen only last year.

For the rest of the time he devoted himself to his family and the third career he had forged, as a crossword setter. His father's wordgames had never left him and he had written regular pieces for the Guardian, as well as hatching crossword clues to "fill in the time spent hanging around hotels on picture assignments". The paper accepted his first puzzle in 1966 and it soon became clear that the range of his self-taught knowledge was extraordinary. It was the quarry from which he crafted his clues. Gilbert and Sullivan was one important source, starting with his nom de plume: Bunthorne being the aesthete and sensitive poet who woos Patience in Patience or Bunthorne's Bride. But to solve a Bunthorne clue, you might also need to recall that Gilbert's childhood nickname was Bab and that, before he teamed up with Sullivan, he wrote The Bab Ballads. Or that St Paul for a time followed his father's trade as a tent and sail maker. Or that Oley Speakes (died 1948) wrote the music for songs like On the Road to Mandalay and When the Boys Come Home, which were sung in the Smithies household in pre-television days.

Austen, Burns, Kipling, Dickens, fine wines, obscure French cheeses, jazz, classical music, both the Old and the New Testaments, the papacy, Judaism, Greek Orthodoxy, oriental religions, the heroes of the great Magnum photo agency, gardening - these were just some of the worlds that he brought to his puzzles. It was important to him that he was setting puzzles for the Guardian, both because he was a quintessential (Manchester) Guardian man and because he thought that Guardian solvers would be on his wavelength. Most of them were most of the time, and his craftsmanship with clues excited real admiration from fellow setters.

For example, he once used s'il vous plait as an anagram indicator, meaning that you needed to plait (ie twist) the letters involved. For some solvers he could be a bit too clever, but even then the pleasure of being able to crack even half of one of his elegant puzzles was in itself sufficient reward for the effort. The clue, though, of which he was (rightly) most proud was simplicity itself. "Amundsen's forwarding address (4)". Answer: Mush!

Bob married his childhood sweetheart Mildred and they had two daughters and a son, who died aged 15. After Mildred's death, five years before his retirement, he married Judy, who survives him with his daughters Philippa and Eleanor and two grandchildren.

· Robert "Bob" Smithies, photographer, TV presenter and crossword compiler, born April 4 1934; died July 31 2006